Of highland-lowland borderlands: local societies and foreign power in the Zagros-Mesopotamian interface

Narratives of civilization are spun from the juxtaposition of a civilized self with that of a barbarous other. Such an opposition is never more easily constructed than from the distinctiveness of lowland and mountain topographies, environments, and life-ways. Studies of highland-lowland relationships across different periods, places and disciplines also place the two realms in conceptual opposition and only rarely engage in depth with the interaction that must underwrite all negotiations of identity. We can trace the first attested construction of such a dichotomy in the texts and iconography that detail Mesopotamia’s interaction with the Zagros highlands in the later third and second millennia BCE. The recent opening of the Kurdish Region of north-east Iraq to international archaeological research now provides us with the opportunity to investigate Bronze Age communities located in transitional and highland landscapes and their relationships with the lowlands. In this paper we take a critical approach to the conceptualization of highland-lowland interaction in the past and in modern scholarship and formulate a bottom-up, archaeological approach for the investigation of highland-lowland encounters. Drawing on our recent work in the Upper Diyala/Sirwan river valley, we present crucial new settlement and material evidence, which challenges traditional interpretations of the region as a homeland of mountain tribes and begin to write a more balanced, local account of socio-cultural development and external interaction between this borderland region and a series of Bronze Age imperial powers

Proton dominance in the 2^+_2 -> 0^+_1 transition of N = Z\pm 2 nuclei around Si-28

E2 transitions in Si-30 are investigated in relation with intrinsic deformations based on a method of antisymmetrized molecular dynamics. By comparing E2 transition strengths in the mirror nuclei Si-30 and S-30, transition matrix amplitudes M_p and M_n for protons and neutrons are discussed in mirror analysis. Particular attention is paid to the M_n/M_p ratio in the transition from the 2^+_2 state to the 0^+_1 state. The M_n/M_p ratio in Mg-26 and Si-26 is also investigated. It is found that the proton dominance in the transition 2^+_2 -> 0^+_1 in Si-30 and Si-26 originates in the oblate trend of the Z=14 proton structure.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Elucidating the Relationship between Chinese Medicine and Systems Biology: A Multi-Sited Ethnography

Ever since Chinese medicine encountered modern science in the late nineteenth century, the relationship between the two traditions has been extremely one-sided. At best, scientists perceived Chinese medicine as an archive of primitive knowledge from which potentially useful drugs could be extracted. Chinese medicine practitioners themselves, meanwhile, began a long struggle throughout the twentieth century to modernise their medicine with the help of Western theories and technology. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the involvement of systems biologists in Chinese medicine research created a new encounter, however, that, at least in the rhetoric of its actors, promised a very different kind of relationship: a match of two systems brought together by a shared interest in understanding life, health, illness and medicine as intrinsically complex and not amenable to the reductionist approaches of mainstream science. This research empirically investigates the nature of this relationship and how it emerged. It aims to contribute to the contemporary history of Chinese medicine by exploring the relationship between Chinese medicine and systems biology. This thesis argues that a heterogeneous network evolved, which is composed of human and nonhuman actors and their interactions created globally distributed research projects on Chinese medicine and systems biology. For the purpose of this research, a multi-sited ethnography was conducted over a period of eleven months and a literature survey was employed to trace the start and the development of this heterogeneous network. Ethnographic data reveals in four chapters on the rhetoric and perceptions of the actors, their involvement in Chinese medicine research, their laboratory practice, and the networks and political ties, which developed into a heterogeneous network of Chinese medicine and systems biology research. This research concludes that in the 2000s, a heterogeneous network emerged through the shared ideologies of systems thinking and holism. The shared ideologies set the groundwork for systems biologists to engage with Chinese medicine on its own terms, and created scientific practices, co-operation and funding opportunities between Europe and China

Zytologie im Internet

Zusammenfassung: Das Lernen am Computer (E-Learning) ist von zunehmender Bedeutung für die zertifizierte ärztliche Aus- und Weiterbildung. Auch im Bereich der Zytologie gibt es verschiedene Möglichkeiten, sich mittels frei zugänglicher Online-Kurse weiterzubilden. Ein Teil davon wird in dieser Arbeit vorgestellt. Für die Lernplattform PathoBasiliensis ( http://www.unibas.ch/patho/ ) haben wir verschiedene Lernwerkzeuge zum Thema Zytologie entwickelt: Eine Bilddatenbank mit 726 Zytologiebildern, einen Zytopathologiekurs zur Vermittlung von Grundlagenkenntnissen und ein Lernspiel für die histologisch-zytologische Korrelation. Zwei Tests zum Thema Lungen- bzw. Urinzytologie wurden von insgesamt 383 internationalen Teilnehmern absolviert. Die virtuelle Mikroskopie wird die Telezytologie und die Aus- und Weiterbildung im Bereich der Zytopathologie revolutioniere